Show report; also, open mike plans

The show yesterday went well. My material was well received, including the new song, which I was worried would creep people out, but everyone laughed.

I talked a little to Allysen Callery before the show started. She was quite nice, and I enjoyed her music also. (Somewhat unusually, she plays a nylon-string guitar.) I asked her if she had done one of the 'Songwriters in the Round' events before. She said that she had done three, and that something about it tended to make her write about things that she normally would never write about -- often intensely personal things. She expressed hope that I had written something funny to offset this.

Which, actually -- I had brought along the lyrics on a piece of paper so I wouldn't have to worry about remembering them. (Performing a new song in public always kind of freaks me out.) While I was singing the second verse, I noticed that the guy sitting to my left, Rob Hinkal of ilyAIMEY, was raptly reading the lyrics sheet, so I broke off to tell him, "Hey, there's no reading ahead! That's not how this works!" and he looked away, abashed. He told me afterwards that he noticed there was a big word at the beginning of the first line ("Hey, darling, won't you please put down that old Necronomicon?"), so he looked ahead to see what the song was about, and then the next verse was about goat sacrifice, and it was around then that I called him out, so he was just as happy that I had done that. Ryan Fitzsimmons declared it the most evil country music song he'd ever heard, which, OK, fair enough. (Although is it a country song? I guess I will have to record it sometime soon so you can judge for yourself.)

A half-dozen of my friends turned up, which was very nice and made me happy.This all (mostly) ties in with topic #2 of this post:

There is stuff happening at the open mike on Wednesday January 17 at Tazza Caffe this week: ilyAIMEY is one of the featured acts (they were good on Sunday), Chris Monti and his bass player Nick Pagano are going to be open miking to promote their show the next day, and I'll be open miking also.

So if anyone wants to join me at Tazza, my old offer of A FREE DRINK for anyone who comes to an open mike to see me play still holds.

Tazza's address is 250 Westminster Street in downtown Providence. The open mike generally starts around quarter to 9 pm. I will angle to get an earlyish slot (before the featured acts, which start at 9:30 pm and go to 10:30 pm generally).